Previous transaction gateway systems are considered linear in nature. In previous gateway systems, both a predetermined originating system and a predetermined destination system are either part of the interfaces to the transaction systems or encoded in transaction information itself. Although those previous transaction gateway systems use the transaction information to statically route a transaction and may appear dynamic with several inputs and outputs, they do not dynamically make decisions on how to process and route a transaction. In some previous systems, processes of deciding the best paths may be in place, but the final destination of a transaction is the same.
In U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,931,917, 5,978,840, 6,072,870, and 6,304,915 B1 (Nguyen et al., 1999, 1999, 2000, and 2001) disclose a payment gateway system. The payment gateway system receives, unwraps, and decrypts payment requests, converts transaction data to host-specific formats, and then forwards mapped requests to one host. U.S. Pat. No. 5,983,208 (Haller et al., 1999) discloses a method for communicating between a gateway and an existing host payment application. U.S. Pat. No. 6,373,950 B1 (Rowney, 2002) discloses a method for transferring electronic payment information from a first computer to a second computer. In the disclosure, a payment gateway system formats transaction information and transmits to a host legacy system. U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,611 B2 (Kranzley, et al., 2006) discloses a system including a payment gateway. The payment gateway performs authentication and sends transaction data back a message originator, and enables the message originator to use its existing payment system protocol for actual authorization. US Pat. Pub. No. 20030009382 A1 discloses a method using a merchant payment gateway server. In the method, an electronic payment request is directed to the payment gateway server, and the payment gateway server identifies and authenticates the request, and routes the request to an internal payment/loyalty program or to one of payment/loyalty networks. U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,201 B1 (Guck et al., 2001) discloses an electronic transaction gateway. The gateway establishes communications between a host system and trading partners. U.S. Pat. No. 7,566,002 B2 (Love et al., 2009) discloses an identification verification system which includes a transaction gateway. The transaction gateway receives a communication associated with identification verification, determines whether the communication includes a request to verify encoded data, routes the request to a service, receives a result of the service, and transmits the result to a requester. In all these disclosures, either originating systems or destinations of transactions are predetermined, transactions are statically routed to destinations. In general, these gateway systems or methods lack dynamic features.